


Eys da ttende

by julads



Category: South Park
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Colonialism, M/M, POV First Person, Resistance, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-14
Updated: 2017-10-14
Packaged: 2019-01-17 11:54:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12365223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/julads/pseuds/julads
Summary: In the war-torn land once known as Hvftentes, Lieutenant Kyle Broflovski becomes the Rótland Empire's most hated war criminal.





	Eys da ttende

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the [Stan/Kyle Zine](http://stankylezine.tumblr.com/), which, after two years, is ultimately being released as a .PDF as opposed to the promised hard-copy format. Thus, in an effort to garner more traction, I'm posting it here instead. 
> 
> This story is a wildly dense dystopian war AU I wrote back in the summer of 2015. You can read some more of my thoughts on thid fic [here on Tumblr](http://julads.tumblr.com/post/166431505140/eys-da-ttende-for-me-this-fic-is-really).
> 
> I owe a big thanks to Hollycomb for beta reading this!
> 
> Warnings for: violence, references to torture, forced detox, imprisonment, brief suicidal ideation, starvation, verbal abuse.

Six a.m. the morning after, five years in: from the somber shuffle of the camp, a private brings me a cup of hot water—breakfast. I hold the tin can in my gloved hands and stare at the sky, scrutinizing the darker clouds rolling up from the south. We can’t afford snow, not now. We’re still a half day’s trek away from the nearest base in Bycchen, and with forty or so wounded, we’ve surely depleted our medical supplies by now. As if on cue, someone’s anguished groan cuts through the howl of the wind. 

In the barked words of General Eysenclýn (a Lai’róte, mind you), we should have gone back to Vintlag Harbor right then and there; my call for retreat was “the foolish desperation of a rut coward who’d sooner save his own filthy skin.” This telecommunicated rant was delivered in my ear in the immediate aftermath, just as soon as we had managed to retreat back into the lower Sobentür Mountains. Eysenclýn continued screaming until the connection cut out when we delved into a narrower stretch of the pass. 

I should clarify that, capture of the harbor or not, Eysenclýn and the entire Rótland war machine would’ve been much happier to have two hundred Rót presently lying dead in Sventorssen-controlled territory and serving as physical evidence of our ethnic failure to realize the most critical operation of the past year. Yes, it certainly would have been a game changer, and I, being so happily alive, will be paying for it. Someone has to. I can only expect the cost will be nothing short of hell; Rótland’s specialty is making people—non-people—pay hell. Realistically, I don’t expect anything short of rounds of complicated torture ultimately ending in public execution: _“Don’t miss the event of the season!_ _Anti-freedom rut lieutenant responsible for war crimes in Hvftentes to be rehashed and undercoiled this Sunday in Feqreq’iq Square (or some comparable venue with just as many q’s)!”_ If only I were being egotistical. Torture is not unlike art, and Lai’róte brutality hardly precludes creativity.

We pack up and head out before seven. I keep my eyes on those clouds, relieved to see their dark shapes steadily rolling west, back over the range. Conversely, our going is slow, and my troops struggle against the wind as we push forward, lugging the wounded in our arms, the fear of _“What now?”_ in our bones. Though I, too, am weary, I am not eager to see our westernmost military base come into view up ahead. So when it does, materializing down in the valley in all its barbed wire splendor, I freeze in my tracks. Wildly, I consider making a run for it, but drowning in the Iza Sea would be my only option. And in that case, they’d just punish my troops instead, likely with amplified brutality. 

Eysenclýn is waiting at the base’s entrance, staring me down as we approach. Once on the driveway, he marches towards us and slaps me in the face with such force that I fall over into the snow. Before I can compose myself, he has me by the collar and is dragging me inside the base like a fox a dead rabbit, all the while barking insults and slurs in his clipped Lai’róte accent. 

He shoves me into a chair inside the interrogation room and stands before me, sputtering with a fury that ignites when I dare to look up at him. Then he punches me in the left eye, sending me toppling out of the chair. “Lieutenant _rut_ ,” he growls, “you’ve been charged with fifth degree insubordination.”

The lieutenant lies motionless on the concrete floor, his shuddering not violent enough to be noteworthy. The mad dog general lets loose and starts kicking his body over and over and over again; the Rót Commander on the other side of the two-way mirror finally averts her eyes; “rut filth”, “rut filth”, “rut filth” rings through the lieutenant’s ears (no static buffer this time); one of his ribs snaps and punctures his left lung, overshadowing the agony of thousands of broken blood vessels. Only eons later is it over, the dog panting, salivating, satisfied, and the lieutenant so unluckily still conscious, in fact never more alive, every nerve in his body spastic and crackling, fumbling, and failing to paint fully white a vertical canvas. Eventually, his battered nerves win out, coaxed along by a drug so lovingly injected. The lieutenant slips over into zero time then, so cloaked in Nothingness that he is unaware he is being cut open and mended, reconfigured, stitched up, made anew. He stays in her empty arms for days, now lying under horizontal, sanitized white. 

* * *

Things weren’t always like this. Before the war, before the mines were discovered, and even before the happy union of a teacher and a train engineer, we were children, in love, in the mountain town of Andurheit.

In the storage room after classes, where we definitely shouldn’t be, we’re piled on top of each other amongst the stacks of cardboard boxes, pawing, kissing, panting, and desperate for the newfound addiction of exploring each other’s mouths. I feel gloriously insane, wanting to consume and be consumed, chasing after both feelings at once and never having enough of either. I’m kneeling before him, into him, and then— _oh!_ —I feel it, astoundingly hard, against my thigh, and I quickly readjust my legs, my mind spinning even more.

He must have noticed, but he doesn’t say anything, so we keep fueling the fire.

“I only ever want to breathe your air,” Stan says, panting on my mouth, my swollen lips.

“Okay,” I say, and then, upon inhaling his hot breath: “Me too.”

I remember looking over his head then and seeing through the narrow window that the gray late afternoon light had turned a tired periwinkle, the obnoxious shade of six p.m. beckoning me home for dinner, chidingly saying, “not yet” to our treaty, as if, in its celestial wisdom, it knew better than us. And I guess it did.

* * *

It is dark when I first crack my eyes open. A bright blue circle stares down at me, its disk housing a loop of familiar symbols that chastise me for an untimely awakening. When I awake up again later, that same circle reads ten o’clock quite plainly. I realize I’m in the infirmary ward, in the last bed, in a “room” created by a ceiling-high canvas partition. Someone else is here, fiddling with something at my bedside.

“Oh, you’re awake,” he says, his crisp accent a disconcerting cross between Rót and Lai’róte. “I’m your nurse, Gary.”

Gary is too kind. I am grateful, but I know better: his uncanny sweetness, in line with this cozy, drugged-up recovery, is likely part of a very calculated psychological manipulation. And yet, it is so nice having drugs running through my veins, lulling me to sleep in this clean bed, encouraging me to replace reality with dreams. I end up playing right into their hands and then some: I dream of primary school, of college, of our apartment, of the trip to Leshy’drévo that never happened. The infirmary ward becomes a place of comfort, so much so that I begin waking up confused that I am not in our bed. When I wake up calling his name, I realize that I need to put an end to this.

“How much longer am I supposed to be in here?” I ask Gary harshly, bitter and embarrassed when he comes in asking me who Stan is.

“Just a few more days,” he says, coming over to the side of my bed to check the I.V. “We have to detox you first.”

I hadn’t even considered that. Suddenly, I’m horrified with myself for languishing in this drug-induced stupor; all I’ve done is exacerbate the duress of having my system purged. It was stupid of me to not realize this. Not that I had—nor have—any choice in the matter. A citizen’s health, particularly a soldier’s, is the sole domain of Rótland. _“How should a sick person know what’s best for them?”_ is the standard rhetoric. This inarguable propaganda is born of popular truths such as _“Obedience yields order and order yields freedom”_ , which began to decorate everything from park benches to the façades of government buildings. It’s nostalgic remembering that there was once such a thing as personal autonomy, but then again, it’s probably best you don’t remember. Even so, I can’t say it’s done me any good to be dreaming so much about a man who is most likely dead, or a life that is most definitely so.

Somehow, I don’t dream at all the next three days. I’m years beyond entertaining symbolic explanations of anything, so I take it for what it is: further avoidance. I wonder, though, what would have been the point of dwelling over it? Enhanced agony is all: imagining countless frightening possibilities and scenarios, all of them fueled by fear, not truth. The fear I do allow myself is condensed within the short trip down the hallway, Gary pushing me in a wheelchair to a small room with a padded chair with arm straps. He guides me through it, explaining everything with such revolting reassurance in his soft, strange voice, saying, for example, “I’m going to hook you up to the clarifying solution now.” I’d almost rather have Eysenclýn’s unapologetic viciousness—at least it’s not so contrived.

At first, there is just a feeling of coolness around the area on my arm where the I.V. needle is. Then it starts spreading, gradually getting colder until it’s uncomfortable and then outright painful, like my body is filled with icy shards. The intensity is indescribable, all-consuming, and I can hear myself screaming, begging for it to stop, my determination to grit my teeth long gone. It seems to go on forever, my insides washed over with searing cold and burning heat, continuously, endlessly.

It must go on for at least fifteen minutes. I never lose consciousness. When it’s finally over, Gary unstraps me from the chair and hoists my sweaty, limp body back into the wheelchair. He’s surprisingly strong—it's ludicrous that I can appreciate such a thing even now. (I mustn’t care about dignity anymore.) He’s thankfully silent as he wheels me back to the infirmary, offering no tacky praise about how well I did. He beckons an older female nurse to help him lift me back into bed. The sheets have been changed; the pattern is different, simple rows of light blue x’s on white, no more tantric beige paisley. The afternoon sun is similarly simplistic, but intensely so, blaring through the large window’s slatted blinds. Gary pulls the cord, shutting them, and then leaves with the other nurse. Alone now, I stare at the blue clock, watching 2:07 become 2:08, 2:09, 2:10, 2:11...

The next day, I wake up feeling remarkably good, like my body is ten years younger. That is, until Gary arrives to tell me I have a “big day” today.

I could slap him. “Shut up,” I snap, unable to come up with anything cleverer. Gary falls silent. He places my uniform at the foot of my bed and leaves. Good. How dare he so merrily refer to my damnation as a “big day”, like a birthday or anniversary? He must be some sort of imbecile, maybe even a functioning addict (he certainly has the access), his capacity for proper behavior eroded by chemical dependency. This is the first unfettered evaluation I make of him. Good! I’m not about to feel guilty, even if he’s a pawn himself. Right now, I should only be worrying about _me_. I don’t know what goes down in Rótland’s Court Martial. The few cases I’ve heard of have fizzled out, the full details never seeming to make their way back to Hvftentes. In hindsight, I should have taken a moment to consider that that can’t mean anything good.

Eysenclýn is the one escorting me to Dyoriq, glorious capital of the Rótland Empire. To my surprise, I’m not shackled before we leave for the train station—instead, he makes a point of waving his gun around, intermittently removing it from its holster to twirl it about like a child’s baton. That’s what it sounds like, anyway: I’ve been ordered to walk ahead of him, so I can only hear it. He may very well be pointing it at me, for all I know. I sincerely doubt he’d shoot me though—my blood in the snow in Hvftentes would be a massive buzz kill for Rótland, to say the least. The next best they could do is go after Eysenclýn for ruining their fun, but his pure Rót blood would spoil much of the entertainment value. Oh, right: he’d just shoot me in the leg.

So our short journey goes on, sans any sudden or bloody plot twists. We arrive at Bycchen Station and don’t have to wait long for our train. I know at once it’s ours because it’s a Lai’róte model, deep blue and littered in golden swirls, very unlike the strikingly geometric H.R.R. models, a few glossy reproductions of which once “decorated” the walls of my home. Embarrassingly enough, people are _ooh_ -ing and _ahh_ -ing over this train, much too ignorant to even question why it’s here, let alone approximate the morbid reason. That’s provincials for you.

Inside the train, the Rótland Royal Guards, decked in their famous red and gold spiked armor, are stationed at the doors between cars. With Eysenclýn now leading the way, we go through about seven or eight cars before reaching the dining car. There, he motions for me to sit down at a table and growls, “eat something, rut.” Then he heads over to the bar where he can keep an eye on me. I’m not wildly fazed by him, much less his language; I’m just glad I can have a deluxe meal here, although, in the grand scheme of things, my appreciation for this “hospitality” is rather pathetic. But these days it’s difficult to invigorate the part of myself that once got so up in arms about things. In fact, it’s been nearly impossible for years now. Idealism—justice, ethics, rightness, even truth—seems about as realistic as fairy tales once foreign police are knocking down your door and sending you and your husband to separate military camps based on the percentage of Rót or Sventör blood in your veins. Then again, now that I think of it, the very reason I’m in this mess to begin with is because I pursued just that sort of idealism, and better (worse?) yet, I followed through with it. I saved my troops, almost two hundred Rót. Or did I? Where are they now?

I order the brunch special of honey porrage, veerish sausage, rieselbort marinated in red lime sauce, and fentel-hollow cake. Everything is delicious, and in very a compelling way: these dishes, like their very names and ingredients, are familiar-yet-not to a native Hvftentan, a bit like the crumbling artifacts in a museum restored to their former living brilliance. Even so, some civilizations would be better off dead. If only history would be so kind as to repeat itself!

Eysenclýn is drinking heavily, which may bode poorly for me if he’s anything like the typical army officer while drunk. And of course, he is. A few drinks in and he’s pounding his fist on the bar, going on a bitter tirade to the poor bartender (bless her) about how rut filth—cue sloppy and aggressive full-body gestures towards me—“fucked this war over from the very beginning” and “all deserve to be shot.” It must be killing him not to have his hands around my neck while I’m sitting six feet away idly eating dessert. I do my damnedest not to express amusement over the fact that he’s losing his spongy mind, just barely satiating his rage by ranting in circles to some nervous Lai’róte woman who can’t possibly be paid enough to deal with his shit.

Just then, two guards come into the dining car to tell Eysenclýn to knock it off. He looks flabbergasted for about a second, then grits his teeth and shoots me a hateful glance. It’s vindicating to see him spoken down to, for what little it’s actually worth.

“Are you done eating?” the female guard asks me, her Lai’róte accent gravelly and cold. She must be at least six feet tall.

I gobble up the last bit of cake and reply in the affirmative. She and the other guard take me to a private suite and then shut the door and lock me inside. “Don’t make us have to restrain you. It would be...uncouth,” she says. This is also their way of letting me know they’re watching me in here, just like they were watching the dining car. It’s sort of cute, actually, their thinking I’d be threatened by any of this.

My door remains locked from the outside for the entirety of the two and a half day trip. Food is delivered through a latch in the door. I spend most of the time trying to mentally prepare myself for court, not that doing so is particularly useful, given my overwhelming ignorance of the system. I try to remember from school how the Rótland Royal Court functions, presupposing that their Court Martial bears similarities. There are five or six Justicars, and then the verdict goes to the Queen and King for approval, and then…? I can’t remember.

On the third day of the trip, around three p.m., the two guards from before unlock my door and inform me that we’ve arrived in Dyoriq. Beyond them, through the windows, all I can see is convex steel.

“You are to walk between us,” the female guard says. “Face straight ahead. Do not look behind you.” I oblige, stepping into the aisle to follow her, the male guard behind me like a shadow. Two more guards join this procession upon our exiting the train.

The station is a steel dome with two tracks on either side that disappear into circular tunnels. In the exact center of the platform is a double-door glass elevator, into which I am taken. Its doors shut with a sleek _ssssswwhitt_ , and then the elevator zooms comfortably upwards. When the doors reopen, they reveal an evening-style hallway with dark wooden walls and pine carpeting. I am led down corridor after corridor, all of them nearly identical except for carpet color, making lefts and rights past doors labeled in practically indecipherable gold script. The guard leading the way stops for a moment during this convoluted journey to refer to a crumpled scrap of paper from her pocket; apparently, she isn’t entirely familiar with these hallways. Finally, we reach our destination, a door seemingly just like the rest. The guard knocks, and from within, a man says, “It’s open.”

“It’s the R.R.G. We have him,” she responds irately.

Momentarily, a gaunt, middle-aged man in a silver suit opens the door. Staring at me, he asks the guard with a touch of incredulity, “Is this him?”

“Yes,” she says, and then: “Two of us will remain out here in the hall.”

“Obliged,” he says miserably, then beckons me into his cluttered, windowless office. “I’m Dzenn Worrfe, Court Martial defense attorney assigned to your case,” he informs me, frowning severely. “As you can probably imagine, Rót, there’s little I can do for you except perhaps highlighting your otherwise good service…”

I’m not sure how useful Worrfe would’ve been even if I were Lai’róte, and even if the preceding prosecution weren’t so damningly reasonable. Reasonable, that is, under Rótland’s military law, which isn’t even to disparage it: I would agree with the prosecuting attorney’s dramatic extrapolation that “insubordination inhibits progress and loses wars.” My sole unspoken contention is that this “progress” comes at the price of Rót blood. But that is neither here nor there—the Rótland Court Martial is no place to argue semantics, let alone voice pro-Rót sentiments; Worrfe himself seems to be walking on thin ice, citing the scowls of the prosecution (Eysenclýn included), the Council, and the one-eyed Justicar. This is notwithstanding the rather entertaining fact that Worrfe was _made_ to argue on my behalf; it’s not as if his partiality is authentic or anything. Regardless, it’s embarrassing to see him grasping for such tattered straws as “six years of blemish-free service” and “not a rebel, just a fool.” (Might as well include “extremely versed in Mathematics” and “never chews with his mouth open.”) And he must know it, too, for by the time the judge heaves out a sigh of stale judicial air and sends the Council out to assemble privately, poor old Worrfe appears quite sweaty and suicidal. He doesn’t look at me when he returns to the table, then disappears for the hour and a half during which the Council meets. Ninety minutes seems to me like a very long time for a bunch of Lai’rótes to determine a Rót’s guilt, but I suspect they all probably had a catered lunch. It’s been about eight hours now since I was given a bowl of processed grains through the holding cell door.

A pleasant tri-tone bell apparently signifies that court is back in session.

“Lieutenant Broflovski,” the Justicar says, staring me down from the bench with her single dark eye, “since you have been found guilty of the severe and exceptional charge of fifth degree insubordination, you are to face severe and exceptional punishment. Ordinarily, I would sentence you at this time. However, due to the unique and unprecedented nature of this case—not to mention the continued effect that your decision at Vintlag is having on the war—I have come to the conclusion that it would be in the best interest of retribution that a special committee be organized to determine the particularities of your fate. In the meantime, you will be incarcerated in the Hurn.”

The Justicar’s cool complacency as she taps the gavel, a lock of black hair slipping from behind her ear, and those thin, unpainted lips having sent me to the slang word for beytrocj nests, the last place you’d ever want to stick your hand: this is the moment when reality snaps back into place for me, cutting through the courtroom like lightning. What she has said is this: _“We’re not even going to give you the privilege of knowing how we plan to further dehumanize you; in fact, we should like some more time in order to come up truly creative approaches.”_ Lai’róte think they are so clever when they do this, wrapping one horror up in another, folding our minds in on themselves and exploiting our fears. They presume I am terrified—it’s their tiny consolation. I stare hard into the Justicar’s eye, making my own eyes wild, letting them speak for me: _“I can see right through you.”_ Although it’s practically undetectable, just a tiny twitch of the corner of her lip, I’m certain she smiles, as if just having read some intriguing or unusual snippet in the newspaper: _Would you fancy that! What a strange world we live in!_

The four royal guards from before take me to a holding room, where I’m given some crackers and water, for which I try very hard not to be grateful. Soon, the Hurn guards arrive. Donned in black and silver, there’s a whopping dozen of them. If this sheer number isn’t just standard protocol, I must take it as a delusion-fed compliment that they think I, soldier though I may have been, have the physical prowess to take out any lesser number of their armed guards. So these twelve dutiful death-bringers lead me back through the labyrinth of hallways to the same elevator from before. No one saying a word, we ride back down to the station and wait on the empty steel platform. I consider jumping in front of the train when it arrives—really, seriously debate it—but once I hear it coming, once I see that little green light growing larger inside the dark circle, I don’t have the guts to go through with it; I just imagine myself dismembered and bleeding but alive on the tracks, definitely salvageable, a whole slew of extra amenities at the Hurn racked up as tribute for my escape attempt.

So the train, black and undecorated, pulls into the station with dull fluidity, no Rót bones crunching under its heavy wheels, no impure blood on steel tracks. I regret my hesitation as soon as I step on the train; its interior is hard and basic, very un-Lai'róte-like and, paradoxically, very unnerving: the silk tablecloth has now been torn from the termite-infested dining room table. Reality is sharpening fast, the truth becoming weightier: I am going to suffer more than I ever have, and only eventually, maybe, will I get to die a very gruesome and very painful death. That stint of defiance I had in the courtroom has fizzled out, the embers extinguished along with the train’s bloodless arrival. There is no exit. My hands are shaking, so I put them under my thighs and try to breathe evenly, quietly.

The train ride is very short, maybe only three minutes. We don’t arrive at a station; instead, the door opens into a hallway that is similarly plain and steel-plated—a hollow prism, the slick bowels of a modern dungeon. The ceilings are relatively low, and rarely do we pass a door. I am led through these halls, meandering as always, and then down four flights of stairs, ultimately reaching a damp corridor that leads to a single door. The leading guard punches an code into the keypad, and the two isosceles and two obtuse triangles that compose the door slide away, exposing a small, barely-lit room with only a toilet and metal shelf for a bunk. The guard steps aside and needlessly tells me to go in. Keeping my head level, not looking at him, I cross over into my final stop. The triangles slice shut behind me like barber’s scissors.

At least I am alone. And for now—as short as ‘now’ may be—it seems I am safe, as per the Justicar’s decree. In a similar vein, I guess it’s true that I never expected to be violently shoved about by any Lai’róte guards, neither R.G.G. nor Hurn; they belong to a body of higher-ups that would likely roll their eyes at the boorishness of Eysenclýn’s rage-fueled beating, for example. (And beyond his ignoring military code, that’s probably another reason it wasn’t mentioned in court.) After all, privileged Lai’róte are not sent to war-torn Hvftentes. So, they, being on top and behaving accordingly, will instead take their time and exercise good self-control in the name of “shining justice” (sadism) for their beloved “old Rótland on high” (torture capital of the world).

I lie out on the cold floor and close my eyes. God, I hope Stan didn’t go like this. I hope it was on some battlefield I was nowhere near (I used to look for his face amongst the enemy lines). I hope he got shot in the head and was gone before he ever realized he’d been wounded, his last thought totally mundane or perhaps perplexed, but not horrified or grief-stricken. I know this is just conjecture though; the reality may be that his death was slow and excruciating or, however less likely, that he’s still alive and suffering because of it. So I do take relief in knowing that, statistically, he is probably dead. It’s too intolerable to imagine him cold and wounded in a tattered Sventör tent, or frostbitten and dehydrated somewhere in the mountains, looking up at the cold sun as the wind whips his face, wondering how much longer this war can go on.

God, please let him be dead.

* * *

For three days at what might be the same time, the bottom triangle of the door slides into the floor for a second or two, just long enough for someone to kick a metal tray with a hard biscuit, a clump of processed meat, and carton of milk-protein into my cell. Immediately afterwards, the triangle shoots straight back up back up to join its brothers and reform the door. I sense this ‘food’ would taste revolting if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve been hungry since having brunch on the train that brought me to Rótland. So that’s something, I guess.

The next time I wake up, I’m in total darkness. This concerns me because the overhead light, a single orange bulb behind a square piece of corrugated glass, has been on consistently since I arrived, never once shutting off to signify “night”, for example. Does this mean something? Maybe they’re just trying to mess with my mind. Typical. I close my eyes so light or lack thereof makes no difference. There’s nothing in here I need to see, anyway.

It feels like a lot of time passes that no food tray is delivered. After a while longer—maybe two days?—this seems less suspicion and more truth, as further verified by my reaching a new level of hunger wherein my stomach actually hurts, as if I’m being impaled by spears. How very characteristic of them to coddle me with a routine for three days just to abandon it, leaving me confused and hungry. How very clever. And even worse, here I am taking their little mind games to the next level, torturing myself by obsessively thinking about food, filling my mind with images and smells of roasted lort’chopp, hightail stew, sandspine laycean, moreltop pudding with kouyfe bits. Ugh…

More time passes. The light does not come back on, and no food appears. My sleeping and waking hours blur together into a confusing continuum. I never feel entirely awake or entirely conscious, and true, deep sleep becomes more and more elusive. When I’m “awake” I force myself to drink, though by now I’ve eschewed the hassle of flushing the toilet multiple times in order to collect enough water in the milk carton. The food thoughts are less invasive now, for thinking is hard period, my mind feeling slow, lethargic. I do, however, I manage to piece together one crucial realization: they won’t have me starve to death—that would be too boring. Watching me drink toilet water doesn’t even scrape a one on their scale. The question is, then, when will they deem me sufficiently starved? How close to death do I have to be for them to begin the next chapter of torture? How will they even know when I am just shy of my demise?

I must be getting close though—I can feel my body weakening: it’s a struggle to even lift my arms, let alone crawl over to the toilet to drink. What would they do if I stopped drinking? Come in and force me? At least then I wouldn’t have to get up.

Not long into my thirst-strike (if you can even call it that), something strange happens: I hear a muffled conversation out in the hall and then sharp scraping sounds on my door. Eventually, the scraping subsides and gives way to a metallic teetering noise, like something being pried open. Then I’m blinded by a bright, fleeting light.

“Lieutenant Broflovski! Is that you?” a man calls out. The light—a flashlight—is now focused squarely on me, peering like an eye through a V-shaped opening in the door. “It’s the E.D.T.! We’re here to save you!”

The E.D.T.? What is this? A trap? A game? Does it matter? “Yes, it’s me,” I manage to say, regretting it at once.

“It’s him. It’s him,” he says to someone else. Then the light disappears from the narrow crevice, receding into the hallway to illuminate the man’s work prying the door open. Eventually, it gives way and opens electronically on its own, the triangles falling away with that metallic _szznnnnnk_ sound. Two large shadows stand in the doorway. I panic, using all of my might to shift closer to the wall.

“Who are you?” I demand, my voice hoarse from lack of use.

“Let me,” a woman’s voice says. “And turn off that flashlight.” We’re covered in darkness again, and then I can sense someone kneeling down next to me. “We’re Hvftentans,” she says softly, boldly using that almost forgotten national identifier. “The E.D.T. is an insurgent alliance between Hvftentans and Sventörs. We bombed Dyoriq five days ago, not knowing you were down here. We thought you were in the Hurn—the big one, I mean—up in Clawenshýd. We only just found out that they keep the most high-profile war criminals under the dome in Dyoriq itself. …I’m so sorry.”

My mind is slow in processing her words. “You bombed Dyoriq?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Using Invisidem ports,” she states simply, as if I know what those are. Then she asks, “Are you injured? Can you walk?”

“I don’t know.” I try to stand, but I fall right back over again. She ends up carrying me on her back. The man follows behind us, shining the light just beyond her feet. Otherwise, we are in complete darkness. I close my eyes, listening to the sound of their boots on the concrete, sometimes splashing through water. We start going up steps. Eventually, the going gets slower, her climb up each step becoming more and more labored. She then tells the man that he needs to take over, and so I am handed over. He smells oddly pristine, despite the smell of sweat.

So the ascent goes on, its beat steady if not imagined, for the route begins to feel like y = x, though I know that’s not true; the stairs I went down the first time were indeed a series of flights, not one fantastic descent towards my little cage. But now with my eyes flickering shut, smudging details away like a battered eraser, we might as well be shooting straight to heaven; I might as well be dying, almost dead, almost there. Yes: one by one by one melts down, drooping 45 degrees to the cool axis; then the journey’s pulse relaxes as if tranquilized, sighing as it morphs into the beat of my child-eyes blinking tiredly at the full moon through the backseat window.

The rupture, in turn, is horrible: it is the creaking of a neglected door; it is voices mashing together (“You got him!” “Is he alright?!”). The chaos is as deep and as loud as the drooling violet of dusk seeping into this shattered alleyway; as the ashes and smoke and gilded fangs claiming the streets beyond; as the mystical humming of fluorescent vibrations. Then I’m taken somewhere, somehow—into the wall? The sky? The humming gets louder—a bug in my ear? They put me down on a cot and start rolling my coat sleeve up; the woman shows me a bulging I.V. bag and tells me something I can’t parse; the man is saying other words, his voice soft and soothing but the sentences equally hard to decipher. I give up and throw my head back, resigning myself. The stars are in full bloom up above.

As the coolness spreads through my veins, things begin to feel more concrete, the divide behind my mind and reality hardening. We—the man and I, the woman having left—are in a small room packed with medical supplies, like the back of an ambulance. The night sky is still above me, but I can now see the translucent tremor of the ceiling before it, thus dispelling the moment’s final absurdity, even if I don’t fully understand the logic. That is, until the man says something even more preposterous: “Your husband is there waiting.”

I turn my head to stare at his clean shaven face, looking for a cruel smirk on his lips or the flicker of deceit in his eyes. I find neither. “Stan is? Stan Marsh? Where is he?”

“Like I said, he’s at our headquarters in Missensorë. We should be there in about twenty minutes or so.”

It must be that I just don’t believe him, or maybe I am still confused or even newly drugged, for I spend the remainder of the trip in a cognizant yet still somewhat spacey calmness, sitting up and taking slow and tiny sips from a carton of SnowDream milk that the woman has brought me, the kind we had in primary school.

An intercom recording advises us to prepare for arrival just when I’ve about finished the milk. Then the background humming changes, booming almost uncomfortably loud before going on to imitate a computer’s last breath when shut down.

“Just stay put, okay?” the woman says. “We’re going to wheel you out.”

“I think I can walk.”

“You can try soon,” she replies, already wheeling me out into a narrow hallway, its walls decked with military equipment.

“Where are we again?”

“At E.D.T. headquarters outside Missensorë, in the Hrosken Mountains. Still on the Hvftentes side though.”

The man walks ahead and punches a code into the keypad, opening the armored double doors. Like stage curtains drawn back, an entirely different world is revealed to me: amid a wide corridor with massive, curved windows, a small throng of people in olive uniforms stand somewhat tensely. Front and center is a man about my age, thirty-two, who, even beyond the shaggy black hair and blue eyes, is so painfully, impossibly similar to how he would have been that I am completely arrested for a moment, wondering if this is heaven and if I am dead, too.

“Kyle!” he shouts out, at once at my side. His eyes stricken, suddenly wet, he cups my face in his shaking hands. Barely holding back sobs, he asks, nearly blabbering, “Are you okay? Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”

Oh, Stan. It is you.

“I’m okay,” I say, weakly, unconvincingly. “Are you?”

His brow crinkles, a tear slips out of his eye, and he lets out an astounded, nearly bemused breath. “Of course I am.”

 _Of course_ , like it was preposterous he would leave me alone on this planet. Oh, Stan. I should have known.

The woman interrupts, saying that we’re going to the infirmary. Stan remains at my side, moving along with us down the hall of this massive, heavenly place. It feels surreal, in all its damning materiality: the clean swish of air on my face, the intelligible block letters of signs on the wall, and the tenacity of Stan’s grip on the bed’s railing. I put two fingers to the inside of his wrist and close my eyes, focusing on the little throb of his pulse to the exclusion of all else.

* * *

After only a day in the infirmary (Stan ever by my side), I feel completely normal again, by which I inclusively mean assured of the following facts: I am safe; I am in a top-secret location in Hvftentes; I was rescued from the Hurn branch in Dyoriq by the E.D.T., a radical insurgent group of allied Hvftentans and Sventörs working to end the war; Stan has been a spy for the E.D.T. for a year and a half, having joined after escaping the Sventör army with seven other soldiers; I am considered something of a hero for my actions at Vintlag Harbor, which, in addition to Stan’s insistence, is what motivated the E.D.T. to continue its P.O.W. rescue mission into the bowels of Dyoriq post-bombing.

“I told them if they didn’t go back to get you, I would,” he explained. He’s not trying to sound heroic—I know he really would have come for me.

I’m discharged in the afternoon and given a schedule for the types of food I’m allowed to gradually introduce to my diet. Stan takes me to his room in the living quarters, where I’ll be staying. His bed is unmade, just like it never was when we were kids—his mother never cared about that sort of thing like mine did. There aren’t any windows; a square overhead lamp is imbedded into the ceiling, much like how it was in my cell in the Hurn. I turn away from it and drop myself down on the bed, greedily breathing in the richness of Stan’s scent on the sheets. I hear him kick off his boots and he joins me on the bed, sighing, then wraps his arms around me.

He’s probably been thinking about doing so for a while when he very cautiously asks, whispering, “Are you really okay?”

I freeze, unnerved by the question—I know he doesn’t mean my physical health per se. “Can we just not talk?” I say, trying to sound friendly about it.

“Sorry,” he says, then holds me a little tighter in further apology.

Later, after dinner, in this bed again but in the darkness only a windowless room can offer, I pretend we are in our apartment in Andurheit, that when we wake up in the morning, I will go to the high school we both graduated from, and Stan will go to the train station. I can’t seem to convince myself, though.

I wish this war never happened. I wish I could just not think. I wish I could let him fuck me. I wish I could convince him they don’t need him for the raid on the Sventör capital. I wish I weren’t so afraid to tell him everything that happened to me.

I feel him shift under me; my crying and shaking must have awakened him. “Sorry, sorry,” I mumble into his arm.

He kisses the top of my head and pets me, saying dreamily in his mostly-asleep state, “I got you. I got you.”

I put my knuckle to my mouth so I can feel the cool metal of the ring I never take off against my lips. You’re right, and it will be true _eys da ttende_ —‘til the end—and after, too, in sickness and in health, in war and peace: I’m yours and you’re mine. It’s enough. It has to be.


End file.
